Olivestone, realized just two years before the artist's death, is one of the major works of his late career. In this work, Beuys elicits a unique and perfectly balanced synthesis from disparate opposites. He combines plant and mineral, solid and liquid, male and femalᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚe, chaos and order, and utility and aesthetics in one object. The result is a sculpture seeped in tradition and indicative of the transformative elements of Beuys' oeuvre.

Italy's rich heritage provides the chief inspiration for Olivestone. The sculpture is made from an original 18^th century oilpan, a large sandstone basin traditionally used in Italian cellars to decant olive oil for consumption. Beuys obtained the oilpan from his Italian gallerist Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, who offered it to him from her family's cellar in the Palazzo Durini in Pescara, central Italy. Into this utilitarian frame Beuys inserts a slightly smaller sandstone block, allowing for a narrow gap between the original casing and the filler stone. He then saturates the piece with approximately 200 litres of olive oil. The porous sandstone acts as a sponge, absorbing ♎the oil and incorporating it into the stone itself. Due to this interaction, the work requires additional olive oil to be added from time to time to maintain a constant oil level. Therefore the piece is ongoing, developing with the aid of its owner and constituting a 'work in progress'. 

The present piece is the original Olivestone produced by Beuys in October 1984 for De Domizio Durini's F.I.A.C. exhibition stand in Paris. In December of the same year, Beuys created 5 more Olivestones from this original piece. They graced the inauguration of the Castello di Rivoli, Turin's Museum of Contemporary Art. The work is related to his ongoing series, Difesa della Natura, begun with Domizio Durini in 1971 and carried out under the banner of Beuys' 'Free International University' (FIU), an art academy he founded to encourage creativity. The Difesa della Natura project developed from the artist's relationship with the Italian enviro꧑nment.

Beuys applies a thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure to create the Olivestone. Olive oil represents the living plant kingdom, as it derives from the fruit of the olive tree. In contrast, the stone represents the inanimate mineral kingdom. The original, empty oilpan stone basin represents the female element, while the solid sandstone inserted into that casing serves as the male element. The addition of olive oil, which permeates both the inner and outer stone, fuses the two together. This transforms the stone and creates one reality from two separate bodies. Finally, by turning a strictly functional agricultural tool - the oilpan - into a work of art, Beuys overcomes an 💯opposition between utilitarianism and plastic arts by creating a hybrid from a tool handled by farmers that now serves as an artwork, but retains the essence of its original context because it is comprised of only the original materials: sandstone and olive oil.

The key to all these contrasts is that they compliment each other, rather than cancel one another out. The concepts of ying and yang serve as Beuys' guiding principles, allowing the opposites to join together in a symbiotic relationship which results in more than just the sum of the contributing parts. His 7000 Eichen (7000 Oak Trees) (1982) installation created for Documenta 7 used a similar combination of plant life and stones. However, this work strove to accentuate the disparity between the trees, which grow and change over time, and the stones, which will remain the same for as long as they are left alone. 7000 Eichen deals with the difference between two elements, whereas Olivestone exemplifies the hybrid state that can result when the plant kingdom and mineral kingdomꦺ come together.